Scheduling appointment times for a service provider is typically a manual process. A service provider may utilize scheduling software to keep track of appointments. Upon being contacted by a service consumer, an employee of the service provider may enter an appointment in the scheduling software for a time agreed upon with the consumer and subject to availability. In many service industries, the needs of some consumers may be more urgent than others. For this reason and others, a service provider may need to prioritize appointments in regards to one another. When a service consumer makes an appointment with a service provider, the service provider typically needs to know the reason for the appointment in order to evaluate its priority before an appointment day and time can be determined. For example, when a patient (service consumer) makes an appointment with a health care provider (service provider), the health care provider may need to know the patient's symptoms and health history to complete the scheduling process. Some medical conditions require more immediate attention than others and therefore may receive a higher priority during the scheduling process. If the priority of an appointment request is high and there are no available time slots in the near future, other appointments with a lower priority may need to be shifted to another time in order to accommodate the request with the higher priority. The process of evaluating and comparing priorities of appointments, rescheduling, notifying consumers of changes, etc. may be very complex.
If a consumer's appointment time is changed as the result of a higher priority appointment, the provider needs to notify the consumer of the change to his appointment time. The provider may have contact information for the consumer, but the consumer's contact information may be incomplete or outdated. Generally, the process of contacting consumers regarding changed appointment times may be difficult and time consuming for the service provider.